Consequences of Legislators’ Private Sector Jobs in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: Policymaker Characteristics and Behavior

Abstract

Legislators can legally be employed in the private sector at the same time as they hold public office in around 80 percent of democracies. There is widespread voter concern that this results in preferential access for wealthy corporations and influences legislators' actions in office, thus leading to biased democratic representation and conflicts of interest. However, the literature studying the practice is slim, so we have little systematic evidence on the effects this “moonlighting” has. In this paper, I present new data on politicians' private sector jobs while in office, covering many years in a wide range of democratic countries. First, I demonstrate that, where allowed, many politicians take advantage of the opportunity to moonlight, but that there are significant differences across countries, time, parties, and individual legislator characteristics. Then, I use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits legislators taking up or leaving private sector positions to assess how moonlighting jobs influence politicians’ actions in office (e.g. roll call votes, parliamentary questions, or committee work). Improving over previous efforts, I document heterogeneous effects across countries as well as across parties. In a final step, I examine the comparative determinants of those heterogeneities.

Author

• Simon Weschle, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill